Thursday, July 25, 2013

Only God Forgives

Nicholas Winding Refn is an
interesting guy. He wakes up one morning, takes a shower, and decides to make a
movie about fingering. And he does it – he makes a gorgeous, glorious, meditative,
profoundly philosophical movie about fingering.

Only God Forgives is Refn at his creative peak, it’s not just the
most stylish and visually hypnotic film of the year but also a Katana blade swipe
into the rules of filmmaking. The characters in this film don’t behave the way
humans in a movie should. It’s not a silent film but they don’t have dialogues.
They neither act, nor react, nor express much. They’re more of a ‘presence’, immersed
into the rich dark red neon sprayed textures of the tapestry around them. They
don’t even walk much, and when they do they inch ahead in slow motion. In fact
the only time they don’t sit around is when they slash people’s arms and necks off.
This is Refn gleefully raising Cain with his slow burn indulgence, yet astonishingly,
not a second of his film feels sluggish. The effect is actually quite the
opposite – you’re thrilled by the sheer intensity of the film because each
scene is wolfed down by the next, even more intense one.

This is a very different Refn
from the guy who made the 1995 classic Pusher.
That film was a stripped down crime thriller that made use of natural light
and locations, bereft of any special effects and even music. The technique was
called the Dogme manifesto, a style that was introduced by Refn and his Scandinavian
filmmaker pals Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg to rebel against the
mainstream film tropes and clichés. Refn never did take the commercial route
but he did begin extensively using special effects to heighten the atmosphere
in his films. His Bronsonhad goofy
comedy and horror relayed with dreamlike sequences while Valhalla Risingwas a nightmare through hell with extensive CGI
blood.

While last year’s Drive acquainted us with the mute,
bottled down antihero with the angelic face of Ryan Gosling, Only God Forgives is closer to Valhalla Rising in tone and execution. It’s
not just abstract reality but a fetish film made with dynamic conviction. The
real and surreal are nearly impossible to decipher here, and the Yakuza sword
wielding villain (Vithaya Pansringarm) often vacillates between a God and the
Devil. Pansringarm doesn’t have lines but is terrific as a cop who respects
the sanctity of justice but defies the law and chops people's arms off to maintain justice and ethics,
a character which clearly reflects upon Refn’s approach to the laws binding cinema.
Refn in the past has often delved into the lack of clarity of what is perceived
as amoral by society, and here he has transformed into an utter beast of a
technician to explicate the balance of integrity, the absolution of guilt and
the misguided necessity of the law. The only way he could deal with the
frustration of not getting any answers to the existentialist mysteries of life
was by fantasizing of having a kickboxing match with God, and that is exactly
what we get to see in this film.

While it is many things, Only God Forgives is mainly about the
Oedipal issues of Ryan Gosling’s character, whose mother is played to barn
burning excellence by Kristin Scott Thomas. She flips on the bitch switch so
hard in one instance she even calls Gosling’s beautiful girlfriend a ‘cum
dumpster’. Thomas gets the bulk of the lines but the other characters are juxtaposed to Cliff Martinez’s mystical, infectious score that gets the Thailand set
Muay Thai atmosphere down to pat. The musical cue ‘Wanna fight’ that kicks in during
Gosling and Pansringarm’s brutal brawl is a truly great modern cinema moment.
It’s fine that Refn decided to ditch Dogme, because he’s certainly doing a hell
of a job picking moody music for his set pieces.

He'd been sculpting it all
these years but Refn has finally perfected his own style of filmmaking, Menthol Noir. Unlike
the Malicks and the Lynches his indulgence is action packed, constantly
energetic and entertaining rather than a patience testing arthouse grind. He
approaches violence like sexuality and considers a film as a build up to a
climax. He calls himself a pornographer that way, and considering his films’ elegant
balance of violence, sex and ideology he’s a damned good one. What he is
extremely gifted at, however, is the way he makes murder look beautiful and
stylish, quite like his Korean colleagues and the Coens from the 90’s.